Word: balloters
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...good news is that Florida's current governor, Republican Charlie Crist, is driven more by common sense than by ideology. After taking office last year, he scrapped the antiquated punch-card ballots (e.g., the butterfly ballot) as well as the flawed touch-screen voting machines favored by his conservative predecessor, Jeb Bush (the President's brother, who was governor from 1999 to 2007). A big reason: in a 2006 congressional race in Sarasota County, an incredible 15% of ballots cast on touch-screen machines registered no choice at all - in a race decided by a razor-thin margin...
...database has been able to keep up. And Florida's spiking home foreclosures spell the risk of thousands being stricken from the rolls simply because their new address (or lack of one) suddenly doesn't match what's on file. Voters removed from the rolls get a provisional ballot that county elections supervisors are supposed to verify later; but in 2004, Florida ended up counting only 36% of the provisional ballots cast, far below the national average...
Since the country's colonial days, concerns of voter fraud have inspired ever-more complicated ways to cast one's ballot. Depending on where you live, you may vote tomorrow with a lever, a punch card, a marker or a touchscreen. As election scholar Andrew Gumbel notes, the U.S. has been both a "living experiment in the expansion of democratic rights" and a "world-class laboratory for vote suppression and election-stealing techniques...
...word ballot comes from the Italian word for small ball, ballotta, evoking the bygone practice of using colored shells or beads to cast votes. (The dreaded black ball indicated a "No" vote in ancient Greece). Early American ballots, on the other hand, mostly came in the form of one's voice. Men simply shouted their choice in public, a process known as vica voce. Though it alleviated concerns of illiteracy, the method encouraged intimidation and fraud. One of the most common forms of manipulation involved plying voters with free booze. Even Thomas Jefferson let his campaign dispense liquor on Election...
...aggressive commercials - fifteen states that had adopted the device since its mass production in 1892 had returned them by 1929, calling them too complicated, too expensive and too difficult to keep in working order. In the early 1960s, University of California at Berkley professor Joseph Harris suggested applying to ballots the punch-card method used by early computers - setting the stage for the hanging chad controversy of the 2000 elections. The '60s also saw the introduction of the optical-scan ballot, which borrowed IBM technology traditionally used to score standardized tests like...